Bogost, Levi, McLuhan

Here’s the best of many good lines in Bogost’s response:

“But generally, ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the humanities has meant ‘French and German.'”

I’m glad he agrees with me about the importance of McLuhan, though of course I already knew he did, based on our past correspondence.

For some reason, the “McLuhan is a technological determinist” meme seems to be especially strong in the UK. As I argued in my essay “The McLuhans and Metaphysics” in the collection New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, that notion is simply false, if somewhat understandable.

The understandable part of this notion is that McLuhan does think that the background medium is what counts. In Bristol this spring, Iain Hamilton Grant reminded me of McLuhan’s provocative remark that the content of any medium is about as important as the graffiti placed on the first atomic bomb. (And admittedly, that’s going a bit far. Content isn’t that unimportant.)

So, the background of any medium is the important thing for McLuhan, and forms the environment in which we live. But that’s not “technological determinism,” and for a simple reason. Here’s how it works, for McLuhan…

Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s Laws of Media was the book they were working on together when Marshall had the stroke that sadly put an end to his career, though he lived for another year or so after that. (Eric is still alive and well, fortunately, and living in Toronto. We correspond occasionally.) This book develops a “tetrad” or fourfold structure of all media. Every medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses (or “flips,” they sometimes say).

To take a somewhat banal example, the automobile:

*The car enhances speed, privacy, the oil industry, and countless other things we might think up. But ironically, to enhance something really means to make it invisible, because it becomes the dominant background medium. We start to take the enhancements for granted.

*The car obsolesces trains, trolleys, dirt roads, and so forth. And again ironically, it makes these things more visible precisely by turning them into obsolete pieces of junk. When the train station closed in my hometown in the 1970’s, nobody saw any use for it. I believe someone bought it for a token $1, and it was later torn down when plans to refurbish it came to nothing. Obsolete media of the past are reduced, effectively, to clichés.

*But there is also the moment of retrieval. This means that every medium has a former medium as its content. In the case of the car, what is retrieved? One of the things it retrieves is a long-dead “knight in shining armor” culture. There are duels and jousts and chivalry while driving. There is heraldry in the form of hood ornaments and bumper stickers and “baby on board” signs. In this case, what was once an obsolete cliché has now become an archetype.

Archetypes are “ye olde cliché writ large,” as the McLuhans put it. They are clichés that have been reinvigorated by an actual new medium.

And the point is– this takes work. There are countless dead clichés adrift in the environment at any moment. Which ones come back to life, and which are doomed to be permanent clichés? The decision is not made by some impersonal Ereignis or even by “social forces.” For the McLuhans, that decision is made primarily by artists, taken in the widest sense so that engineers and generals can also be “artists”– people who know how to extract the nectar from clichés and re-adapt them to our present environment.

If anything, one might argue that this makes the McLuhans the very opposite of technological determinists. In fact, they grant an extreme power to the vision of individual creators– perhaps too extreme for the tastes of most sociologists (though not for my tastes).

*The fourth moment of the tetrad is reversal. Extrapolation is not the way to go when imagining future trends, because every current trend will reach a saturation point, and eventually flip into its opposite.

No one has ever done a better job of exploring the dynamics that cause figure and background to flip into another. Heidegger is painfully abstract by comparison.